The Mind Parasites. (Another memorial, this one a little belated, but better late than never. I offer it to the lovely folks at Tom Dispatch for reminding my fuzzy mind of the exact dates. Cheers mates!)

To the faceless masters of the universe and their meat puppets and the puppets’ minions  and their minions’ minions. And to the heirs of Edward Bernays and their indentured mouthpieces and their slave trained monkeys in the media and in the classrooms. And to the chattering classes in all the gastro pubs and trendy bookshops and chic vernissages of this wretched world who, like my erstwhile neighbour, think that we should do the same to Iran because its government “oppresses its people”. May they all rot in some hell of their own making and burn in savage bonfires fed by gigatones of compacted back issues of the Guardian, the New York Times and the Daily Mail.

 

Vortex. aka The Frog Spinner.  Meet the Delvaux twins, Maryse and Jean-Loup.  Jean-Loup doesn’t do anything much; he’s a bit of a nogoodnik flâneur, really, but he’s very pretty, very clever and he throws the best tea parties in & around that neck of the woods.  His sister Maryse is a professional frog spinner. She spins frogs, that’s what she does. She throws a handful of young frogs (sometimes infant wyrms) into the Vortex and makes them whirl and turn and twirl all the way to the bottom of the funnel until they vanish and reappear in the adjacent dimension, where they are picked up by the Shoggoths and their trusty inter-dimensional minibus, the Colometa, and returned safe and sound to their homes, their mothers and their choir practice. All the girl frogs and girl wyrms love Jean-Loup because of his good looks and his tea parties and his delightful crappy jokes. The boy frogs are not exactly enamoured of Maryse but they submit with good grace to this bizarre practice of being spun because it gives them kudos with the girl frogs and earns them extra cuddles from their mothers and the odd exemption from choir practice. The frog mothers thoroughly approve of this rotating caper, for it’s demonstrated that it fortifies the hide and tones down the superfluous testosterone; also, it gets the kids off their hands for a while without the venomous side-effects of day-time telly.

This wee Loony Tune is for my friend Maryse, who loved Mercí¨ Rodoreda and with whom I lost touch some time ago, unfortunately. Here’s looking at you, kid!   NB. No frogs were harmed in the making of this illustration.

Haghesa & Friends. aka El í­dolo de las Cí­cladas. For Julio Cortázar, gone but not forgotten & all that.

It is a little known (and even less publicized) fact that the Minoans inherited the essentials of taurokathapsia (or tauromaquia to you and me) from the earlier Cycladic civilization with this fundamental difference: that in the Cycladic cultures the bulls were the ones doing all the jumping and leaping and soaring and all the attendant acrobatics and pretty capers. Cycladic bulls were a truly fierce lot and no sane human would have dared touch them with a ten foot barge pole except, in very rare occasions, to stroke them affectionately, Haghesa permitting. For these beasties were under the protection of that most fearsome of all fearsome Great Mothers. A person would have to be thoroughly off his or her bonce to cross Haghesa even ever so slightly, for Milady was notorious for her short temper and erratic disposition. She’d as soon bestow her graces and favours upon a mortal as she’d disembowel him just for the pure joy of it.

Another creature under her aegis (or, some say, in cahoots with her) was Erythros, the wild boar, or porc senglar*, as they are called in my erstwhile neck of the woods. He was allowed to take liberties that no other animal was permitted, not even her beloved bulls. In some respects, this ancestor of the famed Erymanthian Boar, fulfilled the triple task of confidante, touchstone and court jester to Madamina -hence the enhanced quota of freedoms.

*Here be a wee link for nostalgic Catalan ex-pats:

https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senglar

Children of Chaos. Our friend Jimmy-Two-Tails vanished into unnamed territories in 2015 following the disappointment of his less than brilliant political career. He’s now resurfaced with a young son in tow. When asked who the mother is, or where, for that matter, Jimmy looks vacant, or distracted, or like he’s gone suddenly deaf.

Last night he took himself and his love-child to visit Old Mother Chaos, to introduce the kid to her and her latest brood, and to discuss with the old girl the ins and outs of parenthood, single or otherwise. Bubbles went along for the ride and also to see if she could grasp the underlying principles of a practice that, frankly, is all Greek to her and her kin since Shoggoths don’t reproduce; if they feel they are short of a few bulks they simply divide like amoebas and Bob is your uncle! When they no longer need the extra discrete protoplasm they reabsorb it collectively.

The visitation went splendidly. Jimmy and the First Mother had a jolly good bitch about irresponsible significant others (that is, Jimmy had; the grand old lady never had a mate -nor did she ever need one, for as well as self-begotten she is self-sufficient in the begetting department- but she is terribly empathic and polite to a fault, so she listened and nodded and tut-tutted in all the right places), the baby was duly impressed by his father’s oratory skills, the young Chaossettes were vastly amused by Jimmy’s vibrant and lavish terms of abuse and Bubbles had a ball, flirting something chronic with all and sundry, an activity she has discovered recently to have a natural talent for.

Rum thing about the Peripheral Grids: they seem to contain more single fathers than you can shake a stick at. Or it might be that the ratio of hard-nosed females to weak-willed males is disproportionately high, who knows. By the way, Jimmy’s baby is called Maloof. Jimmy wanted to call him something Russian, to offset this unending Russo-phobic hysteria, but in the end he went in for an Arabic flavour in the off-chance that it might vex Donald the Orange Canard.